Learning target: I can describe a pattern in how almond flowers turn into nuts, connect it to the bees that growers truck in each winter, and write a first explanation of what an orchard depends on that it does not own.
Read both observations carefully and study the timeline and the table. The numbers in the table are a teaching dataset, not a real survey. Write what you notice before you write what you wonder. Your answers in Part C are first drafts: it is fine to be unsure, but give a reason for every idea. Keep this sheet, because you will come back to it at the end of the chapter.
You will need: This worksheet, Pencil, Calculator (optional)
Each year in late winter, usually starting in mid-February, more than a million acres of almond orchards in California's Central Valley burst into white and pale-pink blossom. California grows most of the world's almonds, and most of its trees flower within the same few weeks. Before the first buds open, trucks start arriving at night, each one stacked with wooden boxes of honey bees from beekeepers in many states. Growers pay a rental fee for each colony and usually set out about two colonies per acre. By recent estimates, the almond bloom uses most of the managed honey bee colonies in the United States. When the petals drop, the boxes go back on the trucks and leave. One more surprise: honey bees are not native to North America. European colonists brought them over in the 1600s.
A grower wants to know how much her trees need the bees. Just before bloom, she slips a bag of fine mesh over one branch on each of four trees. Bees cannot reach the flowers inside, but light, air and rain can. She ties a ribbon on a second branch of similar size on each tree and leaves it open. She counts the flowers on every branch at bloom, and in early summer she counts how many of those flowers became almonds.
| Tree | Bagged branch: flowers | Bagged branch: almonds | Open branch: flowers | Open branch: almonds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tree 1 | 120 | 2 | 115 | 38 |
| Tree 2 | 98 | 0 | 104 | 31 |
| Tree 3 | 132 | 3 | 126 | 44 |
| Tree 4 | 110 | 1 | 118 | 35 |
For q5 try: 'Inside the bag, pollen could not ___ because ___. Without pollination, a flower cannot ___.' For q7 try: 'When almonds are not blooming, the bees need ___, which they can find in ___. If those places were plowed or paved, then ___.' For q8 think about what you would have to buy or build if nature stopped doing it.
Plant breeders have developed a few almond varieties that can set nuts with their own pollen, and growers of these varieties often rent fewer colonies per acre. Predict what the mesh-bag test would show on a self-fertile variety, and explain why such growers may still place some bees in the orchard. Then name one advantage and one risk of planting a whole orchard of a single self-fertile variety.